A system and method for generating a viewable video index for low bandwidth applications are provided. The exemplary aspects of the present invention solve the problems with the prior art systems by incorporating information for generating a viewable representation of the video data into the index, thus generating a viewable video index. The viewable video index contains information for generating a visual representation of moving objects in the video data, a visual representation of the background of the video capture area, i.e. the scene, a representation of the object trajectory, a representation of the object attributes, and a representation of detected events. The result is that the viewable video index may be transmitted to a low bandwidth application on a client device and may be used along with associated object and background models to generate a representation of the actual video data without requiring that the original video data itself be streamed to the client device.